Increasing storage capacity enables users to store very large amounts of content to their mobile phones and other small, portable electronic devices. While the amount of content that should be managed is increasing dramatically the physical UI (User Interface) will not change considerably. The display resolutions will increase but the physical display sizes will probably not increase much since in already existing phones the display covers a large part of the surface area. Text input speed is not likely to increase considerably. Other than keyboard-based text input, the other various methods (e.g. stylus-based) have not proven to solve the difficulty and slowness of text input and the overall phone size miniaturization and display size increase needs leave less and less space for keyboards.
There is a seemingly unbalanced development of the amount of stored content and the physical phone user interface (UI).
One solution by Sorvari et al.: “Usability issues in utilizing context metadata in content management of mobile devices.” NordiCHI '04: Proceedings of the third Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction, ACM Press: 357-363 suggests that context metadata may be used to enhance content management.
Context metadata is information that describes the context when content is created (or received). This context metadata can be used to annotate the content item. This facilitates efficient content management features such as searching and also facilitates organization features.
However, the context metadata may be ‘contaminated’ with metadata that is meaningless to a user. For example, if the context metadata includes the identities of nearby devices, then some of these devices may have meaning to the user, such as the devices of friends, whereas other devices will have no meaning such as the devices of passers by. The contamination of meaningful metadata by meaningless metadata may prevent the effective use of contextual metadata.
When a user wishes to annotate a content item with contextual metadata, there may be a problem in selecting meaningful contextual metadata from the available contextual metadata. Meaningless contextual metadata contaminates the meaningful contextual metadata.
Likewise when a user accesses metadata that is stored in association with content, there may be a problem in displaying only meaningful contextual metadata from the stored contextual metadata.